Everyday in the newness

Usually, in the collected volume of a senior poet, the creative work and its ambit come in for a scrutiny of a poetic life lived or squandered. Most such compendiums also demand that some sort of finality is proffered on them. Full Disclosure — New and Collected Poems (1981-2017) by Manohar Shetty has neither in its scope, in full or half.

After eight books of poems, Shetty simply thought that the time was right for such a collection. Not a swan song, by any means, the fullness of the disclosure in this elegant volume speaks to the readers’ senses in a tongue dripping with multiple images. Shetty is not a poet of familiar places although he writes about known animals, seen personas, and lived experiences. Always in strange places, his craft is a surprise — that of recognising the quotidian in the midst of newness:

There’s a nursery outside

With flowers drooling

And shaking their heads

Over the tall hedge.

I’ve tried to identify

Them by name; some,

I see, have turned

Very red; most are all too

Common; a few, I suspect,

Speak to themselves

At night. I met

The gardener

This morning. He spread his

Palms out towards me.

I noticed that all his

Fingers were green. (‘In a Strange Place’)

Shetty’s images are undoubtedly homegrown. The gardener, in a “Sufi” sense, is the poet’s own reflection. From red to night to morning to green, the spectrum shifts in an array of luminescence. ‘Drooling’ and ‘shaking’ transform to speech, and then comes the final revelation of identification.

Nothing is strange thereafter.

Here, in this book, one finds herself looking at Shetty as an apprentice to nature’s cornucopia:

All creatures great and small make hay

In the sunshine of my straw hair. (‘Scarecrow’)

He’s a master of images for several elements fictional and (in)human:

One of those cosy rainy days

Just right for cards and chess,

Cardamom tea and gossip;

And recalling those times

When arms outstretched

We raised our faces

To the heavens and, drenched,

Found shelter under

The dripping banyan tree,

Our fingers locked,

Our clothes transparent. (‘Memoir’)

The body language of the above poem is a storyteller’s delight — moving from memory to metamorphosis.

Shetty is also a recorder of time that creates its own layered spaces. His work encapsulates angst — I suspect, a generational one — as well as ecstasy:

Sometimes you seem unhinged-

Alone in a room for instance

When your mind escapes

Or after vacant days you wake

To a darkening evening and

You are not a part of anything. (‘Strangeness’)

To be a part of the inscribed emotions is the reward one receives as a reader. Among his work on nature, daily life, Goa, and introspection, there are also poems that display an attachment to political diction of the years gone by and a fond scorn for the predictable:

I’m an open air facility not

Just for birds and mongrels

But for vagrants and peasants

In whose honour I’ve been

Set up, all chiselled stone

And iron in the soul,

My arm in a forward salute,

My boots grounded, in

My left hand an unbroken

Flag of freedom. (‘Revolutionary’)

Past to the present, Shetty’s work is a kaleidoscope. The patterns can soothe or jar, but they certainly evoke sharp emotions. The poems in this volume — from the 1980s to the present — are born of deep surmising and conflict, observations that are fleetingly trivial as well as a record of significant events.

In fact, according to Shetty, anything can trigger off a poem: “in the ‘animal’ poems, a deer caught in the headlights, the strange cackle of peacocks emerging from all that finery — ‘the borders of a Kanjeevaram saree’, the unerring accuracy of bats at night, the single-minded industry of ants, the defence mechanism of porcupines, a pigeon’s head sinking into its own ‘fluffy, embroidered pillow’, the spider hanging like an ‘asterisk’, the face of a praying mantis like an ‘equilateral triangle’, ‘midnight on an alarm clock in the pupil of a cat’, and aubergines (eggplants) which resemble ‘Greek helmets’ and, apart from the animal poems, the yogi is an ‘ampersand’ (the symbol ‘&’) and the biceps of bodybuilders ‘layered like fresh cabbage’. Such similes must fit into the context of the poem and have a wider ramification.”

The poems are also a geography of contrasts. Writing about Goa, his home, we see the caustic turn into the introspective:

We’re the avant-garde

Landscape designers

Leaving for posterity

A palette of red ponds,

Freshly dug earth

Sculpted into bald hills

And lunar ravines — home

To intrepid explorers in

Search of a touch of green,

A single flower, a fossilized

Feather and it’s said the source

Of a mythical river that

Once rippled with fish

Leaping in the moonlight. (‘Mining Gallery, Goa’)

What appeals to the reader in many of Shetty’s poems is the play of light and memory, textures and surfaces, and how the tongue travels through expressions:

Midnight halt in a strange town:

Lurid yellow glare of stalls,

Odd brand names, a southern

Tongue which slithered

Like snakes in a glass case. (‘Departures 39’)

Shetty doesn’t use his images as mere showpieces, purely for ‘effect’. The body, ageing, and creativity are not mere tropes:

I was sixty and still

Ticking when they

Let me go

With a farewell speech,

And a wristwatch. (‘Living room’)

Often singled out as a poet with knack for pastoral metaphors, it’s a delight discovering Shetty’s terse humour:

Assembly is in session.

Members, kindly maintain decorum.

Honourable Chief Minister will respond

full disclosure: To issue of national import.

Keep silence, Madam MLA,

If you cannot support,

Do not disrupt proceedings. (‘Zero hour’)

The full disclosure here is certainly relevant to our times — cheeky and irreverent.

Shetty is particularly flamboyant — to use a rather unlikely epithet — in “Plain English”, a set of short poems where he teases, elucidates, prods and probes, and brilliantly locks down a language use by “recharging old idioms and metaphors” for which he feels strongly.

‘The Writer Hanging by a Thread’ becomes a “brown study”; ‘The Boxer Keen as Mustard’ “would not be/Caught on the hop”, and the ‘The Painter on Pins and Needles’ at first blush was “Struck all of a heap” — all a quaint way of laying out a perspective.

In ‘The Lover Led a Pretty Dance’, one may even say the pastoral meets a refined vaudeville:

Changeable as the moon,

She was at once mild

As milk and wild enough to

Fly on a blue streak.

As for him, he waited, arms

Akimbo. Let him wait, she said,

Till the cows come home.

The crackling humour, the crystallised imagery, and the pithy archaic elegance shine in the poem. The diction, particularly, is an asset of the set to which the poem belongs. “In this age of computerese, can’t allow that older language to simply die out,” Shetty affirmed.

Some of the titles of the section “New Poems” — ‘Postmarked’, ‘Terminal’, ‘Homecoming’, ‘Primeval’, ‘Old Things’, ‘Testament’, ‘Rites After 65’, and so on — seem to point to a graph that contains the later-age poetic tenor of Shetty. But being new, “New Poems” are, perhaps, too early an indication of anything culminating in the poet’s oeuvre. There are allusions to ‘return’, ‘voice ... across the fence’, ‘enduring relics’, a ‘star too distant’, and even to dreaming ‘in your rhythmic/Armchair of the virtues/Of polygamy’ — all of it measured yet unbridled imagination.

Often mentioned alongside the “Bombay poets”, Shetty, however, stands out exclusively as an artist who goes beyond any collective or labelling. From the past to the present, for the poet, he thinks, there’s only pen and paper — no great research involved or a secretarial service.

“I’ve gone through the usual dry spells — there was a gap of 16 years between the publication of my third and fourth books and even that third book, published by OUP, had only a handful of new poems,” Shetty said.

What is ‘postmarked’ in his own career, is also a realisation embedded in his writing:

The bundle of old letters

In longhand with

Smudged postmarks

Saved in a trunk

May now be a relic.

But I can still hear

The scratch of the nib,

The hesitant erasures,

The beaten heart, the crackle

Of the page turned over

And the unsaid like a

Dagger poised between

Pen and paper. (‘Postmarked’)

The ‘full disclosure’ this collection attempts is graded by ‘smudges’, perhaps ‘on relics’, and each ‘erasure’, with time, would tell us how the ‘nib’ scratched each word — not a closure, by any means, and nothing that stills the words. Shetty casually informs that he currently has a poem called ‘Standstill’.

“For the moment, that says it all.”

Nabina Dasis a Hyderabad-based poet who teaches creative writing

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